For the support of a processing unit, for example of a CPU (Central Processing Unit), for time and position related processes, timers are well known. Such timer units can be arranged as single components or as peripheral devices of the processing unit. They can provide more or less important functions for signal receiving and generation in time dependence of one or several clocks.
Known timer modules are either hardware implementations which have to be operated and configured by a processing unit and are characterized by a high interrupt load of the processing unit, or they are partly programmable and have a small microcontroller implemented which, while reducing the interrupt load of the external processing unit, is limited by its own interrupt load.
Examples for known timers or timer units are the General Purpose Timer Array (GPTA) of Infineon, the Advanced Timer Unit (ATU) from Renesas, the Time Processing Unit (TPU) from Freescale, and the High-End Timer (HET) from Texas Instruments.